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Tag Archives: prose

The Last Southern Knight: Cold Mountain

17 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1864, book review, character arc, Charles Frazier, Civil War, derring-do, historical fiction, lawlessness, literary fiction, North Carolina, prose, romanticizing the South, sheltered woman, the Odyssey, violence

Review: Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier
Grove, 2017 (reissue). 449 pp. $17

In September 1864, wounded Confederate soldier W. P. Inman leaves the rural Virginia hospital where he’s been convalescing and lights out for home, without furlough papers. It’s a risky move. Irregulars comb the countryside for deserters, and if they catch him, the only question is whether they’ll kill him immediately or bring him to the nearest town for execution. But he hates the war, which he feels never had purpose, aside from protecting wealthy slaveholders’ property, and combat has scarred his psyche so badly, he’s ready to take his chances.

He hopes to meet up with Ada Monroe, a woman back in Cold Mountain, western North Carolina, whom he hasn’t seen since the war began. They’ve exchanged letters, but Inman doesn’t know whether they ever had an “understanding,” or, if they did, whether Ada will care for him now, in his emotionally damaged state.

But Ada has her own troubles—and a journey to make. Her father, a preacher, has just died, leaving her with a farm gone to seed because of wartime labor shortages and no skills or resources to maintain the place. The late Monroe encouraged—nay, required—his daughter to cultivate her mind and sense of gentility, so that she must never lift a finger in anything remotely resembling physical labor.

Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina (courtesy James St. John, https://www.flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/51363496155/, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

As a consequence, Ada’s extremely literate, plays the piano (stolidly), and can draw, but she hasn’t a clue about raising crops or animals, or about the natural environment on which her existence would depend if she operated the farm. However, she has only one alternative: returning to Charleston, where she was born, throwing herself on the mercy of relatives she never liked, and settling for a husband who’d probably not appreciate her independent mind.

Cold Mountain bears a slight resemblance to the Odyssey, in that Inman, as Odysseus, must endure myriad misadventures and combats to return to Penelope, whom he dares not presume is waiting for him. His narrative is therefore episodic, full of “no—and furthermore” and derring-do. Like Odysseus, he’s clever and needs to be; unlike him, though, he’s not malign. Not ever. Rather, he assists people in distress as he meets them and never surrenders to temptation. He’s more of a knight-errant than an adventurer, and maybe too good to be true.

Meanwhile, Ada has received a tremendous stroke of luck in the form of Ruby Thewes, who shows up because a friend has said Ada needs help. Ruby has no refinement, book learning, or soft feelings but knows all there is to know about the soil, the barnyard, and how to read the seasons. I like that Ada’s tutelage comes hard and that her journey is both internal and external, unlike Inman’s, who seems fully formed. Rather, Ada must shed her old life, and this minute wouldn’t be too soon. I also like how she reads to Ruby, her turn to pass on what she knows, and how they disagree as to what happiness is, or whether it’s even worth bothering about.

Her story moves me more than Inman’s, by far. Ada grows as a character, whereas he doesn’t, and whatever changes he’s gone through, you see them hazily in aftermath rather than in transition. During his odyssey, one physical conflict is much like another, and none stand out for me, either in themselves or what he learns from them. Conversely, her narrative feels more cohesive, and she transforms before your eyes—not without a struggle, which adds to her portrayal. Her obstacles, though daunting, seldom feel ridiculously insurmountable, so she seems more human, less larger than life.

Maybe the greatest pleasure of Cold Mountain is the prose, which has been justly celebrated, and which conveys the characters’ physical and emotional realms with vividness and precision:

In his mind, Inman likened the swirling patterns of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat.

I admire Frazier’s refusal to sugarcoat human nature, and his depiction of lawless, bloodthirsty, and greedy behavior is both real and appalling. If ever a novel did justice to the brutality Americans visited upon each other during those years, this one does. This is a vision of the Civil War that has rarely, if ever, appeared in fictional form.

Nevertheless, the narrative compromises that vision with a romantic underlay, and Cold Mountain is less satisfying for it. As with Varina, Frazier appears to argue that nobody really wanted secession or believed in the war except for a slim majority who held wealth and power. Somehow, I don’t think that’s how the Civil War lasted that long. But in any case, Frazier’s perspective whitewashes his characters while trivializing the history.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lost, and Found: The Redeemed

07 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, Devon, England, First World War, historical fiction, Jutland, literary fiction, machine age, metaphysical through the physical, prose, Royal Navy, social class, social convention, Tim Pears, West Country Trilogy

Review: The Redeemed, by Tim Pears
Bloomsbury, 2019. 382 pp. $29

Sixteen-year-old Leo Sercombe, a native of North Devon and a skilled horseman with a deep love of the natural world, sails with the Royal Navy from Scapa Flow in late May 1916 to do battle against the Germans. That alone would be a peculiar irony, but, even worse, Leo’s encased in a steel-plated gun turret on the heavy cruiser Queen Mary, without fresh air or a window to the exterior. I probably don’t need to tell you that the Queen Mary will fare poorly in the imminent Battle of Jutland. But I should note that Pears suggests how British complacency and pride in an outdated warship brings disaster, and that the sailors pay the price.

HMS Queen Mary leaving the River Tyne, 1913. Almost 1,300 men went down with her when she sank at the Battle of Jutland (courtesy Tyne & Wear Archives and Museum, via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, Charlotte (Lottie) Prideaux, an earl’s daughter roughly Leo’s age and a childhood companion (their illicit friendship having caused great trouble in an earlier volume), studies veterinary medicine on the sly. Lottie watches, pained, as her father’s estate transforms under the pressures of war and modernity. But she’s determined to follow this career denied young women, especially the well-born, and in her zeal, she trusts the wrong party, enduring violence and betrayal. There are no protections in this world.

The Redeemed is the final installment of Pears’s West Country Trilogy and makes a fitting sequel to The Wanderers, a mesmerizing novel of grace and beauty. As with the previous work, in The Redeemed, the prose remains luminous and fixed on the physical world, especially through Leo’s part of the narrative. Many writers try to do this, but Pears has the particular knack of rendering Leo through the natural and metaphysical at once, whether he’s in his gun turret or at anchor at Scapa Flow:

The Flow was a bleak immensity of water, surrounded by low, barren hills. The spanking wind gave an edge to a long summer’s day, and turned into gales in winter. They blew in carrying salt from the sea, and men on deck had to yell to each other to be heard. Though snow was rare, when it did fall the wind blew it into drifts against the gun turrets. The winter days were short and mostly wet. But Leo did not mind the changing weather. With few companions on the ship, he looked outward and felt less imprisoned by their confinement than most. There were frequent, vivid rainbows, and clear nights when the aurora borealis flooded the sky. The first time Leo saw it he thought that the powers of the heavens had been made manifest. That he would see the Son of Man, coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

Lottie’s world involves going on rounds as a veterinarian’s assistant, pretending to be male; learning how to help a mare get through a breech birth; getting angry when a farmer mistreats his animals, all rendered in painstaking detail. But she’s also the daughter of the manor, with a stepmother not much older than herself, and the precarious emotional territory that entails. Through her and the constraints she faces, the reader sees England of the past fade forever, a touching elegy to what once was.

I like both narratives very much, though I think Leo’s succeeds more fully, portraying his social skittishness and fierce desire for independence, much like the horses he loves, and his fear to ask for friendship, which he subsumes in a remarkably disciplined dedication for work. You also see how the machine has come to dominate — the gun turret, the tractor that replaces farm horses, the people he once knew who’ve changed their rural ways of life to accommodate the trend — and what gets lost in the exchange.

Throughout, whether from the narrative, the title, or the jacket cover, you sense that Lottie and Leo are meant to find one another again, but you know the path won’t be easy. Pears strings out the tension to the utmost. Along the way, both characters blunder, especially Leo, who trusts very little and has trouble claiming his own.

Compared to The Wanderers, The Redeemed doesn’t hang together as tightly, and though the story unfolds with riveting detail, it’s not always clear why and how the pieces belong or fit together. Though Pears doesn’t waste words, his discursive style may not be for everyone, though I find it enthralling.

I did bump up against one contrivance. The story implies that Leo enlists in the navy at sixteen to avoid the trenches; but if so, why didn’t he wait a couple years to see whether the war would end first? Had he done so, however, I suspect that those two years would have posed a serious problem for the novelist. What would Leo do in all that time, and might he seek out Lottie too soon? Not only that, Jutland was the only major naval battle of the war, and you can see why Pears wants to include it, for he does a magnificent job of rendering it and linking it to Leo’s character.

But that’s a minor point and in no way detracts from The Redeemed. I think I enjoyed the book more for having read its predecessor, but it’s not essential.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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